It has often been asserted, by both men and women, that men are funnier. We explored two possible explanations for such a view, first testing whether men, when instructed to be as funny as possible, write funnier cartoon captions than do women, and second examining whether there is a tendency to falsely remember funny things as having been produced by men. A total of 32 participants, half from each gender, wrote captions for 20 cartoons. Raters then indicated the humor success of these captions. Raters of both genders found the captions written by males funnier, though this preference was significantly stronger among the male raters. In the second experiment, male and female participants were presented with the funniest and least funny captions from the first experiment, along with the caption author's gender. On a memory test, both females and males disproportionately misattributed the humorous captions to males and the nonhumorous captions to females. Men might think men are funnier because they actually find them so, but though women rated the captions written by males slightly higher, our data suggest that they may regard men as funnier more because they falsely attribute funny things to them.Keywords Humor effect . Humor . Stereotype . Gender . Source memory It seems a truth-while perhaps not universally acknowledged, at least widely shared-that men are funnier than women (see, e.g., Lewis, 2000). Such a view has been expressed by men and women, and often in conjunction with firm assertions that men's humor advantage, if such it be, is not part of any general intellectual superiority (Greer, 2009;Hitchens, 2007). Presuming a reliable gender difference in humor production, various theories have been offered, including suggestions that humor, like the head butting of elk, is done to impress potential mates (Bressler, Martin, & Balshine, 2006). Consistent with such a notion, females indicate a preference for mates who makes them laugh, whereas males prefer a mate who laughs at their humor (Li, Griskevicius, Durante, Jonason, Pasisz & Aumer, 2009). There is also evidence that both genders comply, with women laughing more, and men making people laugh more (Provine, 2000, p.27; but see Kothoff, 2006). However, this evidence does not require that men actually be more capable of being funny, but could be due to some combination of emotional responsivity, differential effort, and pity. There are no direct tests of assertions about gender differences in the ability to be funny.In this article, we explore explanations for the impression that men are funnier than women. It could be that the stereotype exists because it is true, and people have correctly observed the world. The impression could also exist without the stereotype's being true, if people's view of the world is systematically biased. In two studies, we explore these two possibilities. In the first, male and female participants wrote, or at least tried to write, funny captions to accompany cartoon images, and raters, also male and female, evaluated ...
Structured analysis of primary literature, including one flawed and two conflicting papers, highly increased students’ self-efficacy, but a significant increase in performance was observed only for some aspects of science-process skills.
In this paper we look at the impact on student learning of how a class is taught. We compare 2 sections of a non-majors CS0 course offered in the same term, by the same instructor, covering the same content and utilizing the same book, labs and exams. One section was taught using standard lecture practices including lecture from slides, live coding and weekly quizzes. The other section was taught using the Peer Instruction (PI) method that actively engages students in constructing their own learning, instead of absorbing understanding from the instructor's explanations. Using a factorial analysis of variance, we find a main effect of instructional method on final exam grade (F (1,200) = 5.87, p = 0.016) with students in the Peer Instruction section scoring an average 5.7% higher than in the standard lecture practices section. We find no significant interactions among gender and grade or class status (lower or upper division) and grade. In a separate analysis, we also find the interaction of instructional method and high school background to be significant (F (1,147) = 7.48, p = 0.007). In discussion we consider the meaning of these results for educators and describe questions for future work.
The brain extracts from donor animals, trained on intermittent punishment avoidance tasks, were transferred by intraperitoneal injections to naive recipients. Two types of control conditions were used, (1) the brain extracts from untrained donors were injected into naive recipients and (2) water injections were given to naive Ss. The recipient animals also received intermittent punishment-avoidance (running) training. Measurements were made of exploratory, first-trial avoidance, and extinction behaviors. Evidence suggested transfer of avoidance tendencies from donor to recipient Ss.
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